personal development on Personality

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

Every person enjoys dignity and suffers from depravity. The structure of personality is a result of the interaction of these two dynamics.

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

Current research indicates that personality traits are hardwired; they’re largely hereditary and remain relatively constant throughout our lives.1 If we’re outgoing or reserved, energetic or subdued, ...

Even though Carl Jung first introduced the terms introvert and extravert back in 1921 (in his now-classic volume Psychological Types), the concepts—especially introversion—crashed into the public’s co...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been very good at paying attention to my car’s fuel tank. I remember in high school I drove an old Jeep Grand Cherokee that had a digital fuel gauge. In 1998 tha...

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming sp...

My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...

The BuzzFeed-style quiz is taking over the internet, serving up answers to questions no one is asking. What Star Wars character are you? What restaurant trend describes your personality? Which Hogwart...

The pioneering work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has been popularized in recent years by the gamut of notable thinkers, including Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and, in this cas...

Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

Keep yourself clean and bright, for you are the window through which you must see the world.

It’s hard to know how people select a course in life…the big choices we make are practically random. The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who w...